The Clarks as collectors - Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1997 by David S. Brooke

As he readied himself rather nervously for the first public showing of his collection, Robert Sterling Clark [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED] wrote to a friend in 1954: "Do not mention the opening of the Institute to anyone, as you will treat me to a cloud of newspapermen to the detriment of my health."(1)

While Clark was a remarkably private man, he did leave, possibly by oversight, diaries covering the years 1925 to 1946, when he did much of his collecting. The diaries were clearly intended for reference since they contain often quite detailed accounts of visits to dealers, museums, and private collections. Prices of works on the market are also carefully noted, as are conversations with certain dealers. The diaries are supplemented by a few earlier letters to family and friends written from Paris between 1911 and 1916; a correspondence Clark had in the 1940s and 1950s with Paul Lewis Clemens (1911-1992), an artist; and a short memoir written about Clark by the French dealer Charles Durand-Ruel in 1980. These sources paint a vivid picture of Clark as a collector.(2)

Clark clearly had strong opinions and collected works of art for his own pleasure, although he did have the close co-operation of his wife, Francine Clary [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. A distinctive characteristic of his collecting was his enjoyment of the process, as he continually looked at works of art offered on the market, attended auctions, and chatted with dealers. He spent many of what he called "great art days" on "the Fifty-Seventh Street Art Island"(3) in New York City, where he seems to have been welcomed as a well-informed and often amusing visitor. His favorite dealers in the city were M. Knoedler and Company and Durand-Ruel, who between them provided about two thirds of his collection.

Clark grew up with the collection of his father, Alfred Coming Clark (1844-1896), a patron of contemporary artists such as Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903) and George Grey Barnard (1863-1938). When this collection was divided between Alfred's four sons in 1910 after his wife's death, Sterling Clark was leading a scientific expedition in China.(4) To judge from letters he wrote to his brother Stephen (1882-1960) on his return, he was less than satisfied with his share of the collection, and went to some lengths to recapture certain of his parents' pictures.

Sterling Clark's concentration on French nineteenth-century painting, after an initial engagement with older masters, was clearly affected by his residence in Paris from about 1911 to 1921. It was there that he met Francine, a former actress with the Comedie-Francaise. The drawings shown in Plates I and II were probably made on the occasion of their marriage in 1919.

A sense of competition with his brother Stephen was probably another factor in Sterling Clark's collecting. Although the two brothers had a lasting disagreement in 1923 and rarely spoke to one another thereafter, they frequented the same dealers, and there are points of contact between the two collections? Sterling was quick to acquire as trophies Camille Corot's Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome (c. 1835-1840) and Renoir's Therese Berard (1879) when his brother consigned them to Knoedler.

Sterling Clark often made disparaging remarks about advisers, critics, and art historians, and counted it a great compliment if one of "the boys" remarked that he should have been a dealer.(6) His brother Stephen was on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City, but Sterling was associated with no museum, although in later years he did have some words of approval for Daniel Catton Rich, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1937 to 1954, and Francis Henry Taylor, the director of the Metropolitan Museum from 1940 to 1954. Fellow collectors were another matter, and Clark seems to have taken a particular liking to John T. Spaulding and Chester Dale.

There is a certain pattern in the development of the Clark collection. Sterling Clark acquired most of his pre-eighteenth-century Italian, Flemish, and Dutch pictures between 1912 and 1925 from the London firm of Colnaghi, which he must have visited frequently while living in Paris. One of his favorites was the painting by Piero della Francesca shown in Plate IV, which he bought in 1914 from Colnaghi along with five other Italian paintings. He especially liked Renoir, Sargent, and Homer and began to buy works by them early on, building his holdings over a long period. Clark acquired major paintings by Renoir in the 1920s, but did not really begin to buy impressionist landscapes until 1933. He bought works by William Adolphe Bouguereau (see P1. III) and Jean Leon Gerome as well as by their more avantgarde contemporaries. He was very much concerned with the qualities of the painted surface and, especially in the case of Renoir, with color. He also had an ongoing interest in what he called his "little pictures of the 1880s"(7) - anecdotal cabinet paintings by Giovanni Boldini and Alfred Stevens, among others. Clark and his wife even designed a sitting room in the institute for the works of Stevens, highlighted by his Four Seasons of about 1877. This octagonal room can be closed off with mirrored doors that reflect the landscape seen through the opposite window. It is a private room designed for very private people. Indeed, the Clarks led a remarkably quiet life in New York City and Upperville, Virginia, with regular visits to a house they kept until early in the 1950s on the rue Cimarosa in Paris. Much of the art collection was kept in storage and circulated through their New York apartment. They loaned very few paintings, and then only to dealers and always anonymously.